A random window that popped up on my Mac yesterday. Nothing on it is selectable, including the traffic light buttons in the top left. Guess I’ll have to restart, like it’s Windows 95.
Thomas Basbøll is back writing, with a wonderfully meta-post about why one would want to write at all:
The obvious alternative that I’m heading towards is to seek reasons to write within yourself, rather than in your environment. Write for the clarity it brings or the pleasure it affords. Write because it improves your mind, not the minds of your readers. In the future, as most of the prose we need to get by (the prose that stores and transmits useful information) is produced by machines, we will write for the same reason that we swim, rides bikes, jog, go to the gym.
That is the dream.
Never have I ever seen a civilian car racing down the National Mall like it’s their own back yard… until now. Summer heat makes people do crazy things.
Fact of the day from FT’s Edward Luce:
America has 120 guns per 100 people against 4.6 in England and Wales. The next highest democracy to America is Montenegro with 39 guns per 100 people — still a third of its level.
Super-excited about our family’s Montenegro vacation in August.
I have mentioned before that I am not a fan of IQ as a measure of anything other than un-intelligence and have linked to Taleb’s short essay on it from way back in 2019. Well, that same year Sean McClure wrote an even more thorough account of why testing intelligence as done today is pseudoscience, and you get to learn much more about models, biases, and the scientific method. Recommended long read.
🎭 The Frankenstein adaptation now showing at the Shakespeare Theatre Company was a well-executed retelling of some of Marry Shelley’s book from the perspective of Drs. unfortunate wife Elizabeth, and boy did the actress portraying her do a masterful job. The only nit to pick was just how whiney Victor Frankenstein was — the play could easily have been 20 minutes shorter if they had cut down on his vacillations — but then it would have been a slightly different play.
Some good links from the past week:
Once a decade, I am obligated to read a book from Eric Topol. Ten years ago it was during a rotation at Georgetown where they were handing around copies of The Creative Destruction of Medicine like candy. Of course, if those books had truly been candy they would have been of the sort that quickly congeals into an inedible hard lump because nothing in The Creative Destruction… aged well.
Well this year Topol has a book out on aging, and if it weren’t for some high-profile endorsments I would not be paying it two cents. But then I saw Nassim Taleb praising its rigor and scholarliness, highlighting as an example that Topol cites multiple trials for each claim. One can hope the trials he cites actually back up the claims, and to confirm that is indeed the case I now have Super Agers on the pile. Kindle version only: physical space in our library is too precious for Topol.
🍿Annie (1982) was messier than I remembered. I guess it’s hard to make a throwback to 1950s musicals when none of the skills survived — all that staircase dancing would have made much more sense with Gene Kelley doing the moves.
If not for Carrol Burnett it would hardly have been worth the rewatch.
A random window that popped up on my Mac yesterday. Nothing on it is selectable, including the traffic light buttons in the top left. Guess I’ll have to restart, like it’s Windows 95.
📚 Finished reading: The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis, the intellectual basis for THS. An important book when it first came out in 1943 and even more important now when embryos are being selected for their longevity and human intelligence reduced to a large language model.